RG

26/Atl

[cloroxbox]

I am searching endlessly. I am looking for love in full submission to loneliness. I am using a paintbrush shaped like your bottom lip; I dip into the candy paint, create a mural of momentum into moving on, moving in, moving according to your whims. You, you you you, stand in the corner and wave. Sea salt waves crash into me, marrying your caramel words that drip out of your mouth. I think kissing you would be like dipping my fingers into a fountain of fondue: messy, sweet, and all-encompassing. I am fighting my every primal instinct. I burn it all down- shake my hair out of my face and re-apply a chilly, stinging lip gloss. They’re sticky, sickly, I need to be medicated, and you’re a pharmacy. But instead I fled. I drive past empty windows and Christmas tree adorned homes. I bite back the image of what a refrigerator-lit kitchen would look like with you. Instead I count the red lights and ignore the pit in my throat. I eventually sink into my plush couch and hide beneath a blanket. I bury myself into a book and try not to remember how it felt when your hand was on my back. I keep seeing your name between every line, the curve of your back in the spine, the calloused hands I crave on the paper. I sigh but every breath feels like it should be right into you- in between your lips and reciprocated in a way that the devil himself can’t witness. The electric touch that could melt the iciest of frosty February mornings. The eye contact that would make the earliest morning moon become a blushing sunrise. The sun is, instead, setting on my dizzy daydream. So I give in, submit to the greyscale glow, and wait. 

[cloroxbox]

I once found myself absorbed in a dizzy daydream about you, so sickeningly sweet and salacious it prompted an essay. One of many. You think I’m dramatic, or possibly profoundly problematically poetic. Bonus points for alliteration. You’re still my most beautiful muse. I digress. 

I once wrote of the curve of your lips, the crashing of your wave from across a busy restaurant. I described what I thought kissing you would taste like as the tender taste of a fingertip in chocolate fondue. The mess. The drama. But most importantly, the sweetness- the kind that wraps itself into your mouth and makes you sick immediately but you beg for forgiveness from your insides because you’ll try it again in a few minutes. Or seconds. Now. Now. Now. The sickly sweet serenity that is worth the longest sugar crash. I begged for a peace (or a piece, depending how you decide to interpret that feeling) that would come and go. I evaporated into a frosty December and became one with the snow. I left my agony behind and buried it under a pile of dirty laundry. I added anger, and then sobriety, and then detrimental grief. I took down my Christmas lights, planted tomatoes, and forgot about everything regarding you. My books became books with no allusion to your existence. I accepted the things I could not change (a major sugar crash) and changed the things I could (everything about the me that you knew). 

And then you called. 

And I answered on the second ring. 

God I’m so sick of missing you. 

Don’t let me skip the nitty gritty. 

I listen to your laugh bouncing between my ears and I bury the truth beneath it. I am back where I started, rotten on the inside from months of depravity. Your hand on my back, a muffled excuse me or behind you as you race by. Time stood still, you never did. I dream relentlessly of those times. 

[cloroxbox]

I have spent a myriad of sleepless nights dreaming about our twisted double-edged sword. The way I knew. I KNEW. But my mouth remained shut. Mouth clenched so tightly that my jaw occasionally still throbs.

We spoke our own language these nights. We understood each other's whims without words. Silence between the question and the hopeless answer.

I clung to the hopes of our slippery stope.

You left me hanging, I heard from a friend.

Within reach of your dreams I'm left in the dust.

It’s a story that's been told a thousand times in a thousand ways. The unwavering eye contact between friends over secondhand smoke. Several degrees of separation; seconds turned minutes turned miles.

Secondary characters turned lovers with no screen time. Second chances severed by an alarm-clock shock, it wakes me up. A litany of love letters never sent collects dust on my desk. I'll add this one to the pile.

I stopped wearing chapstick. I know you didn’t like it. My gloss still burns. 

[cloroxbox]

I am searching endlessly. I am looking for love in full submission to loneliness. I am using a paintbrush shaped like your bottom lip; I dip into the candy paint, create a mural of momentum into moving on, moving in, moving according to your whims. You, you you you, stand in the corner and wave. Sea salt waves crash into me, marrying your caramel words that drip out of your mouth. I think kissing you would be like dipping my fingers into a fountain of fondue: messy, sweet, and all-encompassing. I am fighting my every primal instinct. I burn it all down- shake my hair out of my face and re-apply a chilly, stinging lip gloss. They’re sticky, sickly, I need to be medicated, and you’re a pharmacy. But instead I fled. I drive past empty windows and Christmas tree adorned homes. I bite back the image of what a refrigerator-lit kitchen would look like with you. Instead I count the red lights and ignore the pit in my throat. I eventually sink into my plush couch and hide beneath a blanket. I bury myself into a book and try not to remember how it felt when your hand was on my back. I keep seeing your name between every line, the curve of your back in the spine, the calloused hands I crave on the paper. I sigh but every breath feels like it should be right into you- in between your lips and reciprocated in a way that the devil himself can’t witness. The electric touch that could melt the iciest of frosty February mornings. The eye contact that would make the earliest morning moon become a blushing sunrise. The sun is, instead, setting on my dizzy daydream. So I give in, submit to the greyscale glow, and wait. 

[literaryvein]

L. V., excerpts from the afterword

[f-like-m]

Start

[cloroxbox]

a horror author’s guide to existential dread.

who am i to create someone out of nothingness? who am i to create a dynamic between characters out of nothing but spite for them? who am i to write stories about things that have happened to real people, to play God in a Godless novel. who am i to pursue a life built on the demise of fictional characters- in a battle of me vs my creation vs my mind vs my words. who am i to write deaths, terrible deaths like they’re nothing, to write silly stories about silly nonexistent people suffering real pains, real deaths, real grief.

i have been given the gift of wanting , craving, desiring my words on paper. i have created stories, worlds, dreams, everythingness from nothing . new realities and new ideas and new crises and yet i shovel them full of real problems with no solutions. i commit terrible acts on paper and force them through heinous crimes. i force them to suffer terribly with no remorse and no repercussions.

how dare i novelize death and victimize my own creations when death plagued me and haunts me more than anything. how can i put fake people through real tragedy when i will never recover from the things i have been through?

everything i’ve ever written has stuck to me like glue. i hold it close to my chest. i have never recovered, never healed, never chosen or felt peace in my life. who am i to inflict this onto anyone else?

[cloroxbox]

Numerous times you called me after midnight, drunk or high and out of your mind. Once, while with your friends, your phone was propped on the table as you downed three shots. Then, noticing my dark figure illuminated by my closet light on your phone screen, you grinned a toothy grin and whispered, “God, I forgot you were there.” With a sigh you added, “How could I forget you? You’re so beautiful.” 

[cloroxbox]

what I wrote when I dissociated

he is standing in front of me and 

I can taste the vomit on his breath and 

his arms are outstretched and 

his lips parted as he

screams my name and 

he calls me a coward 

but his voice is buried in sand 

my ears are thick and

everything is muffled and 

I’m asleep

no I’m awake 

where am I

I don’t know how I got here

but I know him

I knew him 

every inch of him every 

bump and

scar and

freckle 

is ingrained in my mind

the wrinkles on his skin

match the wrinkles on my brain 

our lips could melt together right now but

instead your hands melt into my throat and

rip out my tongue

and I can’t breathe

let me breathe

let me scream

but 

I can’t

I can’t 

I see you everywhere 

in everyone’s face

I see you and

your hands and 

your eyes and their ferocity 

how dare you call yourself a man

how dare you call me a coward when

you did this

I am permanently changed

I became a part of you

and you of me

we melted together like wax and

you turned me stone-cold

we are 

forever one

forever glued together

forever ruined

[yousaytheydontcare-blog]

[anxeious]

[girlstressed]

"did i tell u this already?" we are in a timeloop and i am in love with u tell me again

[cloroxbox]

I think I know why I have writer’s block. I think it’s easy to see. I have written everything I know in a notebook, on a spare sheet of paper, a guest check, a napkin, the empty columns of books, the back of your hands, the discarded fast food bag that gets swallowed by my passenger side flooring in my car, the receipt that floated gently beneath your bed before I found it and decided it needed ink on both sides. I have written every sentimental feeling and tragedy and fictional notion of love I have felt since I was nine writing stories about groups of girl friends meeting groups of boy friends falling in love in high school and middle school. I have written about my first love, my second, my third, and subsequently my first second third and even more heartbreaks, my experiences with growing pains, my excruciatingly long winded relationship with my mother, the way it felt to be drunk, the way it felt to be in love, and the headache I received from both. I have exaggerated the way it felt to love you in particular. I have tried to gather the words to describe losing my loved ones. I have chewed up your love and spat it out onto the page, it still smelled like whiskey, thank you for asking, and I have burned through every memory of you and made it sound pretty, wrapped up in a little bow under the christmas tree.

I think there is something to be said. And I think I have spent too long thinking I need to be the one to say it. I am a voice of reason in my own turbulent brain. I consider myself the protagonist in my life, I mean that’s the point, right? A hero of sorts, winning the war by puking up every single thing that pops into my head and flaunting it about as if I’m the first person to have a cohesive thought on paper. I’m proud of myself for my ability to extrapolate my emotions in a way that makes me feel intellectual. A hero in my own eyes. Look at me, embracing the pain, an esoteric being of sorts, hiding behind words as if they’re things beyond the naked eye of you average Joes. Look at me. Experience my blinding rage and my superiority complex. Look at me. Perceive me as you will. At least they’ll look.

But what if all I write is indicative of the bigger issue? What if all I am is not who I think I am? What if all I am is the girl he left crumpled on the bathroom floor in a heap, cloaked in blood? What if I am only the granddaughter left behind as they journeyed far beyond anything I can see or experience? What if I can’t see them again, and I am stuck forever being an anti-hero in my own goddamn story that I wrote myself? What if I have created a monster, stuck in a one-bedroom in tears because this is the character I created myself to be? What if all I’ll ever have is the guilt of being the protagonist in my own story? What if all I am is who I am- and that’s all I’ll ever be?

I am not the first person on earth to get slammed into a freezing cold, blue, metal locker on a Wednesday morning. I am not the first person to be on the receiving end of the absolute wrath of a fellow hormone-fueled thirteen year old. I am not the first girl to grieve who she was when she was eighteen because who she is at twenty-three is just a more fragile, frightened version of herself in the dirty mirror (I never quite remember to clean it as I should). I am not the first survivor to feel shame and guilt. I am not the first victim to be blamed for what has happened to me. I am not the first, nor the last, tragic twenty-something scared of shadows but embracing the ghosts behind them. I am not the first person to experience a sign from her guardian angels.

I could disappear, you know. Beneath the trees, shrouded by their canopies and into the forest I’ll go. I could jump out of a moving car and bury myself into the grassy mossy dirty pit beside the road and become nothingness, melting into the earth to be absorbed into the air to become a force of nature, a hurricane so big it swallows you whole. But see, there I go again. Expecting you to believe that I have significance besides my genetic makeup and what has happened to me. What even has happened to me? Here she goes again, expecting you to know what I know about her, me. Nothing consequential. He hit me, and he’ll hit her too. They left me here on earth to rot without them, but people die everyday, right? I got my heart broken. I drank too much. I went to work and experienced empathy and got on a boat, not in that order. I opened my notebook and wrote it all down, I chewed up my agony and then spat it back out. I had an original thought, just kidding. The world is burning and I will burn with it and in time, I’ll realize. I have writer’s block because I’m not a writer. Or maybe I am. But I am no hero. I am nothing special, nothing new. I am experiencing emotions. I hope you enjoy them.

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

{Words by Anaïs Nin, from The Diary Of Anais Nin, Vol. 4 (1944-1947) / Cynthia Cruz from diagnosis,The glimmering room}

[taylorswift]

It’s here. It’s yours, it’s mine, it’s ours. It’s an album I wrote alone about the whims, fantasies, heartaches, dramas and tragedies I lived out as a young woman between 18 and 20. I remember making tracklist after tracklist, obsessing over the right way to tell the story. I had to be ruthless with my choices, and I left behind some songs I am still unfailingly proud of now. Therefore, you have 6 From The Vault tracks! I recorded this album when I was 32 (and still growing up, now) and the memories it brought back filled me with nostalgia and appreciation. For life, for you, for the fact that I get to reclaim my work. Thank you a million times, for the memories that break our fall. 💥🐉🏰  Speak Now (MY VERSION!) is out now. 

http://taylor.lnk.to/SpeakNowTaylorsVersion

PC: Beth Garrabrant 

[plumslices]

I love love and am terrified of it just like everyone else

[marimekkogirl]

kneeling into a dream where I am good & loved. if you even care

[sweatermuppet]

im like no worries & then feel so upset i get chest pains