What We Do in Room 6

why hello there traveler

[becauseofstars]

ngl some of this writing aint half bad

like a lot of it is still objectively dogshit garbage but here and there's some passable ideas/workable imagery etc.

if only id spent that time becoming a better person instead of amateurishly romanticizing the suffering ive caused others lmfaooooo

[becauseofstars]

In the summer of 2016, I loved a woman very dearly, but I wasn't ready to quit using heroin. We took a break, then I started shooting IV. She had enough. She left. She's with someone else now, and moved away. Maybe now she can be happier. Maybe someday I can apologize properly.

Yesterday, a breeze kicked up and caught the corner of some printer paper I had left on a table. The breeze scattered the papers across the green grass, and I rose from my seat in the sun, walking to each paper, gathering them dutifully as I wandered in circles, chasing the wind. When I had collected all the stray sheets, I lined them up and stacked them neatly on a countertop inside the house beside a stack of yellowing newspapers. My family keeps them for far too long, events from years past crying out for eyes in headline bold. It had once been for a perfectly legitimate reason, but nobody can remember now quite what that reason was.

I went to a vigil for a young man who killed himself last Friday. The air was filled with cigarette smoke. Most people laughed, maybe to drown the silence. A middle aged woman, the boys mother, knelt in front of a poster board plastered with pictures of her child, her slight shoulders heaving. It seemed like all the world was parting around her. Whoever bought the poster board forgot to pull the price tag before bringing it to the vigil, so it loitered over the young man’s left shoulder, hovering by a picture of him, his arms crossed, face a glowing smile–a tiny street bike tipped onto its back wheel, come to rest at his side like an old, dented friend. I never knew him. I never will.

None of those things are important. None of them will change the world. None of them mean anything at all, and even now are drifting into obscurity, just memories and dreams, like very detailed lies. What are you doing here? What am I?

I don't know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

[becauseofstars]

I'm just a fucking junkie man/ It's all I'll ever be.

[becauseofstars]

You Were the Sea, Once

You told me your eyes held diamonds. I looked; they did, yet soft with drink sometimes: cheap vodka, lit cigarettes, and pot smoke wreathing our hearts, blood laced with ampetamines to burn through moonless nights. You: giggling and dancing like a schoolgirl. You: talking about feeling ghosts in the Shanghai tunnels and frowning at her disbelief, deeper at my silence too.

I had nothing to say. I just liked hearing you talk.

My sister.

You: talking about cartoons and skipping ahead of of me and her, or she and I. You: drinking chocolate milk at dinner and begging us to go to brunch. Such happiness, every smile a second sun to bask in, to bathe. With every laugh born a galaxy.

So when your pain, unfurling and growing in our hearts like a flower of death, the kill–how could we live through that? When the sky is only black and black and black and darkens all the world?

That’s why we hate to see you in pain, You. Our child. Our little girl.

It was such a big bed.

You were nine.

Where was everyone else?

Why did you leave?

My little girl, in more pain than she could handle. More pain than I could handle.

But not dear Anton, stronger man, protect my little girl, I know you can, you there Anton? You can do things I could never do alone, Anton, you have before, knuckles bloodied in an RA’s dorm who’d had too much, ready to take more from the girl with golden hair, his blood too thick, needing to be thinned, needing to be let–you did it for me then, Anton.

Protect my little girl.

And you, You, looking deep into the dark black pools and diving in, sleeping on my bones and shaking, fighting, afraid.

Fear nothing, little one. We will protect you, You.

My daughter.

I sleep and curl up, safe in your embrace and bed while you watch me and protect me. When He came, when I gave Him His name, you laid with me and knew exactly what to do, to say. My hands gripped knives and you melted steel, stuffed bombs with confetti, put flowers in imagined guns, filled bottles and rags with shit champagne. There is already enough pain in the world, you told me. Come back to me, you said. It’s only us, just you and me–He’s nowhere to be seen.

You held me when I cried. You kept me together. You protected me. You made me feel safe. You made me feel loved. My mother.

And You. And I.

Laying naked together, the world impossible small between these grey, cold walls. Our. We. Us. The fog shrinks and we never know quite what’s outside, maybe the world, maybe nothing. When you ran, I followed. I couldn’t lose you.

Every time you wear my clothes, a badge of honor, a piece of me keeping you warm, protecting you, your gentle scent hanging in my closet like the gentlest of kisses. Our eyes locking together. Soft laughter and hands tracing circles across shared skin, our words of friends and drugs, of school and work, our thoughts of love.

What do you want, Mary? You want the moon? I’ll grab a rope, throw a lasso ‘round it and pull it down for ya. How’s that sound?

When we talked about soulmates, she asked what I thought. I gave vague answers, looking only at you.

My love.

We held hands as the Salem rain poured down and clasped they made a little pool, and we caught in our hands our leaping hearts like fish.

[becauseofstars]

Ginsberg

I dosed up and sat on a bed talking poetry and transcendentalism, words flowing in a serotonin fever when she picked up a book of Ginsberg poems and one that starts and ends with please Master.

There are invisible wires in the world that get lain across the path waiting for some kid to trip and lose her legs.

I looked over midrant and found her silent. Staring at the ground.

She never does that.

She dropped the book and I scrambled over, pupils black and heartbeat tripled, and all she could say was “read it, read it” so I picked up the book and I read it, read it.

please, Master

let me suck Your cock

take it deep into my throat–

But no, wait, Ginsberg didn’t write that, just me, so how could I protect you from what he did, from him–from me? no it was different. To you, it was a party in a back room a long time ago, but now I said the same so how could I be guilty but still we blurred together, he and I, cruelty and kindness.

please, Master can I– No, you haven’t earned it but please Sir I– Not tonight, until you– but I That’s an order Master whore.

I couldn’t. Can’t.

I’m here alive to help and heal and here’s this girl in tears from a poem that reeks of me–unless you know, you have no clue what pain can be. I lost myself in tearing eyes and a promise to kill the fucker who raped her, sitting there with clenched teeth and ashes in your heart, smoking lungs, burning hate, head in two, naming my anger (Anton) so I could give him leave to kill and kill and kill.

Who hurt her, me or him?

It’s not about my pain, but the failure to protect a girl, apologize to God I’m sorry–take me, please–I promise to do better.

[becauseofstars]

oh shit waddup

betchu thought i was dead innit? nah just had to get a lil cleaned up, kick junk, get my head together. also i found an old notebook from college with writing in it from freshman year and the writing’s pretty good. two pieces to follow. gonna try to write more this year too seeing as i dont have dope to cover the overwhelming pain of existence any more.

fuck heroin yall.

[becauseofstars]

For Every Second I Hurt/ I Love an Hour.

Recovery and sobriety are beautiful and painful. I’m clearheaded enough to see myself for what I am, afraid but accepting. I hate what I’ve done, to my friends and family and loved ones. I had to drop out of school because I was underperforming; drugs and depression go hand in hand straight to the cliff. I’ve had a near overdose that landed me in the hospital and I’ve made choices that stuck me scared and alone in a cold, uncaring world.

But for the first time in years, I’m able to stare it down. I can sit by the fireside with two great friends and watch the night sky turn pale approaching dawn. I can turn online and see the love of users, both active and recovering, pouring out to find a missing member of the using family. Heroin isolated me from the people around me, and kept me from myself. I wouldn’t lie and say that wasn’t partially the goal. I never wanted to be near myself. I wanted to get the fuck away, stay somewhere else for a while, forget whatever pain was coursing through my body so I could just breathe.

My breaths were laced with the ashes of a thousand cigarettes.

My blood was dripping languid, dreamy heroin.

My sight was clouded and black at the edges, nodding off to oblivion.

That’s not what I want any more.

A user posted here a little while back, talking about how she found her humanity again after she kicked. Her mother’d told her she always felt too much, too strongly. When she got clean, it all came back. Pain first, as is the custom. Getting clean is like waking up from a nightmare only to realize you’re hanging from a cliff. We all live close to death, either by heart or heroin.

Then, all at once, the rest of her emotion crashed over her like a wave. Everything together, almost too deeply to manage. We lose ourselves in the things we most want, and become addicted to everything. My general social vice is to become a sponge for the pain of those around me. I want to take it all and hold on, just for a minute or an hour or more, so the lives of those around me are, for those moments, manageable.

I love this about myself.

And if I can feel so strongly, I’m not the only one. I’m not scared and alone in a cold, uncaring world. For every second I hurt, I love an hour.

I am very proud of my sadness, because it means that I am more alive.

I no longer fall in love with rocks.

[becauseofstars]

Promise, C___ M___ (2016)

[becauseofstars]

Where I Left My Words

You opened the two small, thin notebooks you gave me near two months back and flipped through the empty pages. I haven’t been able to write lately, I told you. I don’t know where my words went, I said.

I know now.

I was born with letters tattooed on the tips of my fingers and poems slipped under my tongue. I’ve seen my own blood and I can tell you it’s black as the ink in any of a thousand pens sitting half-used in messy bins. My pupils are periods and my ribs are ruled lines. Each breath I take fills my lungs with a story and a half, with a dozen more words fluttering in my exhale. To me, the leaves of whispering trees are the tales I want to tell you and the hardened, weathered bark is the cover of a book unwritten, age old and waiting patiently to shelter a huddle of lost and forgotten phrases. There are a thousand sonnets for every stone and a song humming in the folds of every cloud.

But out here, I miss only you. Out here, I realize where I left my words.

Together in bed, I traced letters into your skin. I left poems on your lips. Your arm around my ribs filled the gaps and empty lines; a chapter for every tired sigh and sleeping twitch. When I exhaled stories, you sat quietly by and breathed them in, waiting for the end either in laughter or silence, eternally patient.

I left my words with you.

Our lips have better use than idle talk. Our silence tells more stories than any bookshelf could. Our laughter is the gentlest poem never written.

When my notebooks are empty but my arms are not– the only story I want to write is us.

[becauseofstars]

they called it a senseless act of violence as if there were ever sensible ones.

[becauseofstars]

Terra

But sometimes it wasn’t all darkness. Sometimes it was Jazz Trek and playful hookups and smiles. We helped each other with calculus and heartbreak and smoked pot. We watched Little Miss Sunshine on a Wednesday night. The moon guarded us, smiling down, shaking her head gently, remembering when she was young and reckless.

And with such envy did the stars watch us, burning a million million miles away; they knew they could never live the life we did daily.

Young and free.

Wild and lovely.

[becauseofstars]

Suicide Tuesdays

MDMA is a psychoactive drug listed under the United States Schedule I classification, which includes heroin, LSD, and marijuana. When digested, MDMA triggers a nervous system response that incites the brain and spinal cord to dump all the serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin stored in the body into the users bloodstream. Serotonin is a mood regulation chemical, while dopamine and oxytocin are respectively connected to the human emotions of pleasure and love. The amount of each that is produced under the influence of the drug far exceeds natural levels. In extreme circumstances, depending on how high of a dose is taken, the high level of serotonin in particular can lead to serotonin toxicity, wherein the body overreacts to the excess of serotonin and begins destroying the receptors serotonin molecules bind to. This can sometimes lead to a good deal of serotonin with nowhere to go, and can sometimes negatively impact thought processes and mood, causing agitation and skittishness. When consuming MDMA, a certain amount of serotonin toxicity is expected, and is seldom if ever fatal.

Mostly, MDMA serves its purpose as an empathogenic drug: it improves mood and inspires interpersonal empathy and trust. The high from MDMA can last anywhere from four to eight hours, depending on the dosage and time spread of doses. When “coming down,” the user will probably notice a drastic decrease in mood, possibly dipping into an artificial depression because of the lowered levels of the three chemicals that are often translated as happiness, pleasure, and love. Users call this intense emotional low “Suicide Tuesdays.”

I am an addict, and this is my drug of choice.

What you notice first is the slight shiver that runs from your heart and ripples in circles that slowly push to the tips of your toes and the pads of your fingertips, dotted from a dozen blood tests from donating your plasma. It’s how you pay for your habit; you bleed into a machine and it gives you back your cells, taking a liter of plasma. Thank you for your time, here’s twenty-five bucks in the bank, which translates to a quarter of a gram, which is your typical dose. You make a couple calls, all too conscious of the string around your finger that was a promise to get clean. You find someone who’s selling, and you find them and pay up, money exchanged for a small pill with clear crystals rattling around in the casing like the broken teeth of a dead man’s skull.

You get back to your room and carefully put the pill on your desk, parallel to the edge. You sit there for a moment, thinking. Is this the right thing to do I mean you said you were gonna get sober but one time won’t kill you because you can stop whenever you want this isn’t a physical addiction you just like doing it I mean honestly you could just sell this and make some money or save it for later or give it to someone but who’s really gonna care if its just this once.

The tapping of your finger brings you out of your head.

Just do it.

You down it and chase with fruit juice. You read somewhere that vitamin C can decrease the effects of serotonin toxicity and make the comedown better. You step into the shower and blast music. The water is nearly scalding but you shiver anyway, your skin coming alive, your eyes dilated until the irises disappear. Your breath quickens and you feel your heart beat against your chest. You sit on the floor and let the water wash over you as your jaw tightens down, the last sign of the ramping high. Forty minutes later, you stand and turn off the water, walking slowly from the shower to your room, your body electric, the world slowly breathing around you.

You go into your room and drop your towel, standing naked, staring at nothing in particular while your skin flushes hot in a chemical fever. The next four hours pass quickly, a wide grin spread across your face at the slightest of prompts. You wish everyone you see a wonderful day, and you mean it. Everyone around you is beautiful and so full of life, their embraces and kisses showing as much love as the passing nods of strangers, the world glowing, music flowing from its darkest corners, words flying to your mouth, unbidden winged messengers that appear as doves, their purity and peace and prosperity and promises of kinder worlds, brighter worlds, where awe-filled silences and triumphant choirs and noise live as freely as the citizens on its surfaces. Music and speech rattles your bones and turns your blood to fire. You see everything, and feel even more. You can hold your finger to the heartbeat of the world and it booms louder than the gunshots and rockets and bombs being dropped everywhere else in the world, because wars cannot last when love this strong exists on the same planet.

That’s what the high is like.

That being said, the real world fucks you over in the long run. You start coming down and you can feel the depression creeping up on you. You imagine the serotonin receptors in your body burning away. You slowly descend, more doomed to the incoming pain than a prisoner being slowly lowered into a pit of acid.

It creeps up on you. Your skin slowly dies. Your pupils shrink. You smile less until you notice you can’t smile at all. The colors that were once so vibrant and beautiful become grayed and dull. You bow your head and mumble to strangers as societal pressures to act aloof and uninterested overcome your empathy. Everything starts to hurt. Physically, all you feel is the exhaustion. Your body just dealt with probably around five hours of constant and extreme emotional assault. Your breathing becomes irregular and occasionally you have to remind yourself to inhale. You look out the window and stare at the dying sun until it is well past the horizon.

You want to redose. The despair hurts. You wonder how you could once face the world without the high. You would curl up into a ball, but it takes too much energy. And if you lay down, you can’t go get more.

When you sober up, you sit at your desk, head down. You know what you’re doing. You’re destroying your body and your mind. The drug is beating your body into submission. You think about using constantly. Addiction is destructive.

David Sheff wrote a book about his son’s meth addiction, titled “Beautiful Boy.” I read it over winter break, after I had already formed my addiction. Out of the lines that stuck with me, the most powerful was that Sheff recognizes the destructive nature of addiction. What he says next is more important; addiction is destructive, but it also feeds on itself. He says that the addict likes how destructive and damaging his habit becomes. I had to stop reading and walked out to the railroad tracks by my childhood home, lit cigarette dangling from loose fingers.

When you’re high, the addiction is beautiful. The destruction it causes, the familial distrust, the disappointment of your friends––there is nothing more perfect to the addict than the destruction he will cause. When he’s high, that high becomes his center. Let everything fall away, let grades plummet and risk the rage of concerned friends, as long as the high can keep coming back, as long as another dose is around the corner.

Last semester, a friend asked, morbidly curious, how each of us would prefer to die. I had no hesitations. Death by overdose. Death by empathy and love and the most beautiful destruction I could ever hope for.

My beautiful addiction could kill me.

I know I need to stop, but that’s easier said than done.

After all, I wrote this while I was coming down.

[becauseofstars]

Stronger than God

            We were born in a year where everything pushed to be faster and nobody ever wanted to stop and the rest of the world looked on with wondrous eyes as we moved faster and faster and faster and paper became pixels and everyone just said fuck this  it needs to be better and everyone ran with their heads down saying yes sir I want to make it better give me a plan give me a cube and lock me away and give me busy work and give me a grade and give me a paycheck and give me a good home and 1.6 kids and a white picket fence so maybe I can have a good casket and nobody noticed the world burning away like the cigarettes between our lips until we went to war and burned the world with our own hands and blew apart weddings women and little kids standing on street corners because that’s what we paid our contractors to do and in our drive to go fast fast fast we didn’t see it coming and boom now we were homeless and fucked we all were but the people who can afford it can pretend they’re not because we’ve got coke and meth and speed and we’ve got E and LSD and Special K and we’ve got shrooms and molly and heroin and we run from windowless building to windowless building blasting our personal soundtracks and turning our eyes ears and minds away from the stars and we bitch and moan about cultural appropriation and men who are women who dress like men but like fucking women and check our bank accounts and think about college degrees like any of that even fucking matters because we’re all fucking dying and we’re all fucked and we’re already fucking dead.

            Like if you thought you had AIDS, would you wash your hands after you pissed? If you knew you were dead, why bother?

            The same kid you sat with while he wrote suicide notes and a last will and testament. And you swallowed a pill to keep you awake but fuck! What it really did was straighten all the rough edges and drained every color in your eyes.

            And it calmed you down. You knew. When you locked your dorm room that morning, headed out to get his blood drawn, you knew you weren’t coming back. He told you, he’d down cough syrup and drown his head in codeine, then drown his body in the Willamette River. Facts.

            “OK,” you said. “But you have to let me be there so I know I did everything I could first.”

            He agreed.

            And so you left at daybreak because neither of you got any sleep and you get brunch. The Last Supper. Or like Pulp Fiction.

            Now this is a tasty burger.

            Y’know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in France?

            No.

            Tell him Vincent.

            A Royale with cheese.

            A Royale with cheese!

            Fuck this shit.

            INT. DINER – 6:30 a.m.

YOU: What do you think Pulp Fiction is about?

WAITRESS: Honestly I haven’t seen it in a while so I don’t exactly remember it. Sorry to disappoint.

[WAITRESS leaves with check]

HIM: I still think it’s just about two guys who really want to eat in peace.

YOU: Yeah, so do I.

HIM [quoting]: I just wanna eat my fucking burger in peace, man.

[YOU laugh quietly]

Cut to static shot of BRIDGE with sun rising over THE CITY.

END.

            “They shouldn’t be there when it happens,” he tells you. You agree. He goes in the office, and you down another pill. The nerves are coming back and you needs to cut them back down lock them away make the drugs control you and drain the fear down and away. You think briefly that it’s funny nobody ever uses the word when it’s about to happen. The S word.

            He comes out of the office and–

            Oh.

            He couldn’t get blood drawn here because they don’t have counseling. We walk to the Health Department instead. I’ve heard of gallows walks, but this was absurd.

            Rushing, fluttering, pounding, crackling, a slow shiver and the world brightens and you lose touch. The rhythm, and slow, matter-of-fact, clear-cut, straight lines guide you. That’s it kicking in, thank god. You notice the tiniest fractions of details. The crunch of leaves underfoot. The cracking paint on the houses you pass by. The rumble of an engine. Ants crawling by your feet as you stand on a street corner waiting for the lights to change. You don’t talk to him. He doesn’t talk to you. You both know this could be that one last walk where you still carry that wonderful, fragile thing called Hope.

            And the rush from the pill is like the way you breathe when you’re trying not to wake up the girl sleeping with her head on your bare chest. Her hugging you tightly to her what almost happened that Friday, November 15, and she held you close because you had become a ghost to her.

            But we aren’t there yet.

            In the waiting room he goes in and you sit there. Your hands are shaking. Your knuckles are white. You don’t know it but your jaw is clenched tight. An excon comes in with a woman he refers to as “my girl.” He just got out of a 15-year prison sentence. He’s rough and covered in tattoos. He sits down directly across from you.

            And this excon, he sees you. You lock eyes with him.

            He sees your eyes, irises missing, pupils so wide they block everything else, your eyes only black and white. Your pale skin, flushed with the strainings of a barely-competent heart. He sees the occasional twitch hiding just under your skin. The fast breathing. The clenched jaw. He looks you in the eye and sees that while you meet his gaze, you’re looking right through him like he doesn’t matter. Like nothing matters. He sees the thousand-yard stare and the burning of a matchstick soul.

            He can’t. He looks away. He shifts in his seat so he doesn’t have to look at you. You are untouchable. Later, one of your friends will ask you repeatedly if you’re alright, and your only response will always be that you’re stronger than god. In a waiting room full of sick folk with their heads down, you sit up straight, burning away at the universe, melting a hole through time. Time can’t touch you. Nothing can. You’re a thousand years old.

            The excon could see it. He couldn’t look you in the eye because he could see you dying. He could see death on your skin.

            Like you were already dead.

            And then He comes out and says you have to wait a week for blood test results.

            So he sleeps in your room for five nights in a row. You skip all of your classes that week, including two midterms. You are his last tie, his only anchor.

            When he gets high, you calm him down and distract him. When he picks up a knife, you growl and take it away. When he takes shrooms you find him in the darkness and pull him out with a rope of metaphors and you get him back indoors.

            You text your drug dealer and get more of that miracle. You won’t be able to face Friday, November 15th without it.

            On Wednesday, a rainstorm blows into town. He disappears on a walk and his phone dies. You go out to the bridge. It’s three in the morning.

            You cross the tracks. Townies watch you from dry spots under plastic tarps. You walk on the bridge.

            You watch the black water and wait for his body to tumble into it and break the still water. You wait for a shadow to drop. You stand in the pouring rain and wait for your friend to kill himself.

            Oh Clarence. Help me Clarence.

            I wanna live again. I wanna live again.

            I mean, it’s not that far, right? If he jumped you would too and you fucking know it because you’ve been dead since last Friday practically and you said you could fucking save anyone and save everyone and if you can’t save him how could you live with it? You read his will. He left everything to you. And you fucked and let him die.

            You realize, looking at the black swirl of the river under your feet, color washed away by the pale moon hiding deep under the cover of a thousand clouds, you realize that you’re ready and willing to die.

            Your phone is dead. You have no watch. The rain cuts into you like shrapnel.

            But you have to stay and watch because what if you left? And if he showed up and did it when you weren’t there to stop him?

            He’s already tried five times. Don’t let him make it six.

            When we left for the clinic that first Friday, I wrote on a single page in my notebook. A farewell, I guess.

            “I had to try.” –C

            That’s so fucked up.

            I’m eighteen.

            And I was ready to die.

            Hours passed in the rain and you had no clue but you decided enough was enough. If he wanted to do it, he would’ve done I by now. You walk back. You pass a clock and see it’s almost six.

            You get back to your dorm. They’re all still awake and pale and shaking you and hugging you and saying things like “I’m never letting you go.”

            And you laugh.

            Because how could they hold on to something that was gone? How can you hold on to a ghost?

            You shower in your clothes, jeans and leather jacket. The river mist melts off your skin and the rays of the moon collect in a warm puddle at your feet. At least you took off your shoes first, I guess.

            And on Friday, November 15 we walked to the Health Department and he tested negative and you tried to celebrate the next night but ended up fighting a drunk RA who was trying to rape one of your drunk friends. But he tested negative, and it was over. Just like that. From hell to paradise in seconds.

            And you’re still on that bridge.

            And you’re still locking your door, knowing you won’t come back, leaving a tiny explanation for your death on your desk in a little notebook an ex-girlfriend brought to you from Germany.

            And you’re still sitting up at night watching your friend write suicide notes.

            And you’re still itching for the black and white world of your wonder drug and you want it back, so much so that you buy more and more and one night you push your limits and take too much, and the lines all become so straight that you can’t step over them, and they break you in half instead.

            And you’re still walking to the Health Department, leaves crackling underfoot, while he tells you that if he does it, he still wants to eat at Goudy first because nobody deserves to die hungry.

            And you’re still sitting in a hard plastic chair, watching him come out of the office, expressionless, and you still remember how it feels to lose every hope you’ve ever had, smashed a thousand hopes a thousand times into a thousand pieces like you had dived into a pool of landmines. You remember how it feels to have nothing left to lose.

            He tested negative.

            He’s alive.

            But you’re still fucked.

            Because you’ve been dead since November 15.

            I wanna live again, Clarence.

            Please.

            Let me live again.

[becauseofstars]

200

            Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

            Stop.

            Exhale.

            Smoke and ash, burning. Inhale the labors of mob men and murderers and exhale laughter and insight, pain and love. Get caught, exhale. Is it really so bad as they say? Exhale to the moon and stars, inhale to Hendrix and Echoes.

            If college is a book, intoxication is the theme. Welcome to 6C, get fucked up, believe. Who cares if there’s a god when you’re fucked up or high?

            But then we do care when a boy has his way with a girl. When gunshots ring out at 3 am. When you’re out for a walk and have a polite exchange with a townie waiting for a fix on a dark street. We do care. He didn’t quite do it, but how far was he anyway, how far were any of us? Four in a single, two drunk and two high, too drunk and too high to protect her.

            Isn’t that what I’m here for?

            Aren’t I here to protect?

            Close your eyes, the sands are harsh. High winds, high lives, high casualties. Watch the city smoke. Ash and burning. The fields burn with our skins under the sun, the tears flow with our blood. Theirs. What’s the difference anyway, you kill a man and die forever, the bullet is just a formality. Wars have no survivors.

            But sometimes, the firefights, the bombing, drives, flights, marches. We protect our own, right? Defend your honor, your country, and the girl back home who’s fucking your best friend. You knew it all along, shut the fuck up and get back out there. See his face on every body. Even when there’s no face left.

            Welcome to the suck.

            It was something in their eyes. The kids have the thousand-yard stare. Brothers and sisters killed in chemical warfare, homes housing families of bullets and shells.

            I don’t remember a time of peace.

            No rest for the weary, we can sleep when we’re dead. All of us. Maybe there will be peace when the last bullet is fired. It will be a suicide. Desperation. War will end war.

            Isn’t that what I’m here for?

            Aren’t I here to save?

            Scars of the soul brandished on skin like tattoos, tools of the trade, trading memories in mind to memories on the mend never to heal. They change color in the cold. Why’d you fuck that up? Second son. Never the right name. Heartbreaker. Lazy. Bury tears. Weakness is weakness is weakness.

            Just burn it off and smoke it away. Besides, everyone has it worse than you. Don’t complain, shut the fuck up, why can’t you take it like a man? Fix other people, you’re fine, you’re fine.

Help them.

Save everyone.

Save us all.

            Miss a trick? Look around you, there are a thousand souls to protect and save and you can’t even manage ten. You try one at a time, but you can’t even protect a girl in the arms of a guy in your own room. You turn your back trying to enjoy a moment and look over to find a broken soul, your porcelain doll. Open it up and nothing’s broken, the only thing breaking is my heart. My trust.

            You can’t save everyone.

            Save everyone.

            Fuck me.

            That lovely horn sounds in the distance. For once, I can see clearly. The moon is half full and Orion is halfway into the night sky. There are the lights, glistening off rain-swept rails. It’s the 2:20 freight headed northbound.

            Trains need a mile to stop. They can’t even begin to slow down in a hundred feet. There’s only time for shock and the sudden silence of adrenaline, the beautiful calm inside the storm.

            Goodbye cruel world, it’s over. Walk on by.

            There it is, rounding the corner. Shshshsh the train arrives. All aboard the southbound express on a northbound train. Three. Two. One.

            Where is the engineer? His hand is on the brake but what use is it anyway? He can’t save everyone. We both understand that, even in his desperation he knows the choice is not his. For once, it’s mine.

            The horn sounds, frightened and angry, despairing and wishing for better times, before trains knew how to kill. And the silence that comes after.

            Windy silence. Black silence. Calm silence. Vicious, angry silence that rages against the world.

            Exhale.

            Smoke and ash. Burning. Inhale pain. Exhale serenity.

            I am a leaf on the wind.

            And the train passes.

            Blink. Blink a thousand times and never worry, the angels aren’t here for you today, only to watch and grind their teeth, because you’ve been too much a tease.

            I guess not tonight. I’ll do better. I can save a life. Merry Christmas, you old building and loan, I can stay another day because there’s always another life to save. There’s always one more chance. Just enough time to make a life right.

            Inhale.

            Exhale.

            Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

[becauseofstars]

you say you still care about me and that youre afraid ill slowly drift away and that we’ll never have again what we had before before but here it is the truth comes out and all you want is to get away and have me gone im sorry i fucked up i lied about some shit i did but i feel like it was pain enough to suffer through karmic consequences the universe fucking me hard enough for us both i brought it all on myself and i have nobody to blame but me but here you are drifting drifting drifting because you’ve been looking for an out and here it was tada congrats its what youve wanted for a while and ill never get you back never earn your trust again even with a long time clean and moving forward and fighting illness its not enough for you all i want is for things to be the way the were and it wont happen again im desperate depressed shitty ashamed but not like it matters im exist on the screen not slipped in your sheets like wed both much prefer and whenever I talk all you want is me gone and honestly

I don’t blame you. It’s ok.

Love is forgiveness, and even if we never speak again, be happy, be free. If I can’t be the one who makes you happy, you still deserve it of yourself and/or with someone else. Nothing hurts forever.

[queendaenerys]

Ladies and gentlemen, the President and the First Lady.

[berniesanders]

America becomes a greater nation when we stand together and say no to racism, hatred, and bigotry. Visit Together.Vote to see more and learn more.